$10m investment in QA start-up values it at $60m

19 October, 2018

Inspekto, the German-Israeli start-up which claims to be revolutionising vision-based quality assurance (QA), has attracted more than $10m of backing from German and Swiss financial and industrial investors, valuing the business at around $60m.

The company has developed an “plug-and-inspect” technology that manufacturers can set up in a matter of minutes to detect production defects, without needing any external experts or systems integrators. It is designed to detect defects as they appear in the manufacturing process, rather waiting until the end of the line.

Inspekto’s S70 technology will be launched formally at the Vision exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany in November. The company claims that it can be installed up to 1,000 times faster than traditional QA systems, and at a tenth of the cost.

During the r&d phase, Inspekto worked with “tens” of manufacturers to ensure that the system met their needs. One of them was the automotive supplier Mahle International which, on the basis of its experience, is investing in Inspekto – its first direct investment in a start-up.

“As one of the largest automotive suppliers worldwide, we identified early on the enormous potential impact of autonomous machine vision on production, performance and competitive edge,” says Johannes Diem, who is involved in corporate strategy, venture capital and M&A strategy at Mahle. “Inspekto’s work with our plants has been consistently useful.”

Boren: reinventing machine vision QA

The other investors include Grazia Equity, ZFHN, Planven, THI Investments and Steinbeis. The funding will help to launch the new technology and to conduct further r&d.

Inspekto CEO Harel Boren predicts that the technology “will reinvent machine vision QA,” adding that the financial support “offers a vote of confidence” in the expected impact of the system on the multi-billion-dollar QA industry. “Inspekto’s mission is to make QA managers love their jobs, by giving them complete control of where, when and how visual QA can be conducted.”